| Description |
This thesis explores how Japanese state planners and educators envisioned the relationship between gender, space, class, and hygiene in colonial Manchuria between 1900 and 1938. It examines Japanese colonists’ view of northeast China as a diseased, uncivilized frontier. This belief helped the Japanese justify their presence in Manchuria; it also created anxieties about the colonists’ ability to control and shape the unhygienic Manchurian land and live in close proximity with other ethnic groups without becoming infected and uncivilized themselves. In order to explore the logic behind planning efforts in colonial cities, this study considers how the view of Manchuria as a desolate, diseased land impacted the development of Dairen. It argues planners sought to create modern, quarantined spaces to mitigate the adverse impact of the environment on Japanese bodies. The Japanese colonial government created spaces in colonial cities where middle and upper class men and women could enjoy the benefits of hygienic modernity, but these spaces were not accessible to poor individuals or other ethnic groups. This thesis further argues that though state planners imagined the public, bourgeois areas of colonial cities in southern Manchuria as primarily masculine spaces, Japanese women’s public presence was also an essential component in the landscape of the modern city. Finally, this thesis examines the significance of the home in colonial Manchuria through the lens of textbooks written for Japanese schoolgirls. The texts taught the girls to maintain urban, scientifically managed, bourgeois homes through hygienic practices. The girls ideally learned to insulate themselves and their family members from the corrupting Manchurian environment by taking meticulous care of their homes and protecting the minds and bodies of all Japanese individuals under their roofs. Textbook writers expected middle class Japanese women residing in Manchuria to serve as the guardians of the home as well as the gatekeepers between primitive and modern, dirty and hygienic, lower class and upper class. Thus, the state expected women to make the home a space where empire could be built, maintained, and propagated. |
